Niall, Ross,
 
  If you still  don't agree with DISTRIBUTE  it means that you  are against the
very idea  of it. You don't  want to allow anybody  to use your server,  so why
should other postmasters allow  you to use theirs? That's all I  can say. It is
just  impossible to  say "we'll  restrict  DISTRIBUTE in  some way  so that  my
server doesn't distribute junk I don't  control" because your idea of what junk
is is not the  same as the neighbour's. You've right to  be against the concept
of the  DISTRIBUTE command, but not  against its implementation. I'm  not going
to prepare a  41x41 matrix saying which servers agree  to distribute which kind
of data coming from which server,  there just are two possibilities: either you
allow everything or you allow nothing. And  my opinion is that people who close
their server to  DISTRIBUTE should not be  able to use the  other's servers for
that. This  kind of  thing is  impossible to  implement unfortunately,  and I'm
sorry to  see that  people do  not want  to collaborate  with each  other (this
does not  include those  nodes where the  server is here  only to  handle local
lists --  in that case  I find  it normal that  DISTRIBUTE be locked  since the
server is not intended to work with the network).
 
  Eric